DemoCamp 17 Covered in the National Post

by Joey deVilla on February 27, 2008

I am extremely pleased with the way DemoCamp 17 went. We had some great demos and Ignite presentations at the Toronto Board of Trade dining room, followed by one of the best post-DemoCamp after-parties at the Duke of Westminster. My thanks to all the attendees, the presenters, Jay Goldman for doing a lot of the heavy lifting and the very kind folks at the Toronto Board of Trade.

But the real crowd-pleaser of the night had to be WirelessNorth webmaster Tom Purves’ fast-paced Ignite presentation on why the Canadian wireless industry “sucks.”

Although he was preaching to the converted, Mr. Purves spent just over five minutes pointing out the high price of Canadian cellphone service and compared different price plans from around the world. For example, did you know that Rwanda has better cellphone plans than Canada? Or my favourite stat of the night: According to Mr. Purves, one megabyte of wireless data transfer on Rogers’ network costs $50, a measurement not seen since the early 1990s, when relatively minuscule hard drives cost upward of $1000.

For his efforts, Mr. Purves was rewarded with a standing ovation.

Needless to say, Monday’s DemoCamp was the largest turnout in 17 different meetings. With the Toronto Board of Trade firmly on board (no pun intended) with DemoCamp’s main intention — to foster and develop new Canadian tech talent to the global market — there’s a good chance we may see a local success story sooner than later.

Or maybe cheaper cellphone plans. The jury’s still out on which will happen first.